Why Children Get Stuck in Language Development

So why do children get stuck in language development? There are loads of reasons why. And usually 80% of the time, I would say, from what I see, I'm not quoting any type of study here. From what I see only is that there isn't much of a reason. It's just developmentally delayed. Going into the reasons why doesn't really serve us when we're teaching language development. Right. For instance, some parents will say, oh, why is it? Is it because there's like a brain structure issue, or is it because of autism spectrum disorder? What are you going to do? You're going to cure that brain structure issue? What are you going to do? You going to do operation or something? You're going to give a medicine? We had a parent who came from the country, Georgia, and he was in the medical field, and he was like, ming, if we can find out why my child is having a language development delay, then we can administer medical procedures to get rid of it. First of all, if anyone who can do that, I'm very happy to lose my job, more than happy. And that person will make a lot of money. And also, it cured something really quickly. I'm happy. But it's near impossible, I would say, at the moment in time, we don't even know. We know very little about the brain, okay? To be very honest with you, we really know very little. And the second thing is, okay, it's about autism spectrum disorder. Are you going to cure that? Is there like a vaccine or whatever for that? Well, first of all, we cannot say that it's a disease or it's something that we should cure. It's more of a mindset and how a person operates. Are you going to cure introvert ism? You can't, right? Can you cure someone who's hypersocial? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. So the thing is, don't get stuck yourself trying to find a reason for your child's language development. Try to find out where they're at. And that's my first point. Language levels, okay. There are some patterns to all children who are having a delay in language. They get stuck at specific points. Here are the language levels that I see. First is they don't know how to imitate words or sounds for that matter. And they get stuck there for various reasons, and it's mostly because they can get through the day without talking or imitating. They learn different ways, like pulling your hand, leading, whatever you call it. They get it through crying. They get it through pointing, gesturing, getting a chair by themselves, opening boxes you know, a lot of things that they can actually survive and get by with. So the first level is always imitation. Once we get through imitation, your child kind of becomes a parrot and they imitate everything because that's the new normal of getting whatever they want. So they won't be able to answer questions. So then the next level to get unstuck is question answering. Question answering is very important because it's a new language function. Like imitation is a language function, but question answering is another language function that they understand. They have to give a response, right? So after that, where a child gets even, even more stuck is sentence building. And usually it's quite straightforward until we get to the grammar parts, which is adding like the articles or whatever and we do it through. I'm not going to tell you all the tactics here. You can just grab it for free at www.agentsofspeech.com. course o go there and check it out. But they get stuck there because they're trying to get the message across. So when children want to get their message across that most efficient way. So when they talk, they talk in a telegraphic speech meaning back then, you know, when they made telegraphs with Morse codes and stuff, so that didn't have the functional words or the articles or whatever like is verbs be doing verbs that they needed because all they needed was as short as possible that they can read as fast as possible. And therefore children will do the same because they can just put, put subject or verbal object and you know, what the heck is going on already, right? You can just say, mommy, take me. That's it. Mommy, go out, right? You don't need to say, mommy, I want to go out, please. You don't need that. You just need telegraphic, meaningful chunks that they can say out, right? And then the next level that children will get stuck at is answering why questions. That's up to the verbal reasoning level. And children will get stuck there for some time learning how to understand the cause effect. Some people don't like to call it that nature of things. Once we've gone through these levels of stuckness, and obviously it keeps on going up depending on the kid. And after that, the errors become a little bit more blurry and everyone's a little bit more different. But certainly children who are stuck in language development, who are delayed have a rhyme to it. Your child's language development is going to follow a pattern that is not typical, but typical within delayed children, okay? And that's why we can like put children into buckets of different diagnosis. So that we can provide therapy every time. And if you say, oh, how about the IEPs or whatever, like, you know, individualized, educational. I don't know what P stands for. The thing is, do you think that all IEPs are written very differently? They're all copy and pasted. There's a repertoire of goals and things that we do, and then we kind of piece them together like a puzzle, and it's kind of different for everyone. That's it. Okay, so the next point is to get child unstuck is usually because we are trying to teach the words, we're trying to teach the structures, we're trying to teach the language without teaching the concept, right? So for instance, if your child is at a nonverbal stage and you want to teach the words for them to imitate the words, but you're not teaching the concept of imitation, then you're going to have a problem. And how we do it is that we don't focus on the words. Maybe we should focus on teaching, you know, just action imitation first. And then when we get through the action imitation, we can move towards sounds and then words. And once they understand the concept of imitating, then we can go forward with it. And it's the same with answering questions. They understand the concept of responding to a question. Maybe we should start off with a receptive way, hey, tell me which one is the penguin? And, you know, just picks it up. Is it right or wrong? Maybe there's a ticket across. I'm making stuff up here, but I hope you understand you need to teach the concept and not the response, the word that we're looking for, because then the child will not generalize it. How many times have you learned something without understanding the true concept behind something? And you tend to. To get stuck at that particular point. It happens to us for different skills and whatever we're trying to learn. And it happens to children who are trying to learn language and develop. Okay, the last thing is, so you're teaching concepts and stuff, right? But you need to teach context. A language is like largely based on the context that we're living in. So if you look at some tribes inside of Africa, they have very contextualized language. There's a theory called universal grammar by this linguist called Chomsky. I'm sure I'm getting his name right or something. But he says that within our DNA, within our head, within our collective conscious, whatever he calls it, we have a universal grammar where we have a learning, a language learning mechanism that just comes out. But a lot of times language is very context and cultural based. So the way that I my voice right now, speaking in English and the way that I move my hands and how I talk is very English. If I spoke in Cantonese, which is my mother tongue, my voice sounds different, I use different volumes. I sound a little more harsh and Cantonese, apparently, but that's the culture. And so back to the African tribe, they didn't have spoken language. And it kind of went into the notion of do they really have a universal grammar. And then the scientists who went there, they realized that the African tribes, they would use a series of sounds whenever they needed to catch a prey and hunt. In that contextualized culture, the main reason for communication was to get the message across when they were trying to get their food, which was hunting. But in everyday life, they didn't really have a reason and a context to communicate with each other other than using signs. So that's why it wasn't learned. It's the same with your child if you don't have the context. And most of the time the context is play. If you don't play with your child in a way that makes them want to play with you, then they won't have a reason to talk to. And the last example I want to make, which is not human, as cats. So if you're on this channel, you see some cats running around. So apparently a bunch of cats, they don't meow at each other. Their meowing was to signal to humans what they wanted. And it's true. If I watched my cctv, they don't talk. It's literally dead silent. They only meow and look at us because they want to show some sort of, I don't know, I hope it's affection that they need food, they need water, they need whatever. And they'll actually guide me to it, right? So language is only learned when the context is correct and the language will actually follow. The language had no function serving a certain context. You know, language won't come out. So therefore don't try to focus on the words. Don't try to focus on getting them to do your own bidding, your own goal. Because the concepts and the context your child doesn't have, and that's why the language isn't coming out. And that's why you will see that children will actually recite ABC123 songs on YouTube because that's the context that they find educational and entertaining. And it's our job to create context that they find, oh, it's actually fun to play with you. So we have loads of videos about how to play so you can search in our channel. And at the same time, if you need more help, you can go to www.com course grab free courses of how we teach children from no words all the way up to well formed sentences and beyond. Okay, so that's it for today. I hope to see you in the next video. Bye bye.